What is CC REL and why does Creative Commons recommend it?
Creative Commons Rights Expression Language (CC REL) renders information about licenses and works machine-readable through standards that define the semantic web. Creative Commons wants to make it easy for creators and scientists to build upon the works of others when they choose; licensing your work for reuse and finding properly licensed works to reuse should be easy. To this aim, CC recommends that you mark your licensed works with CC REL. The Creative Commons license chooser provides HTML annotated with CC REL, while the Creative Commons deeds recognize CC REL on web pages with works offered under a CC license, and use this metadata to enhance the deed for properly marked-up works, e.g., by providing copy and paste HTML that includes work attribution. For more background information on CC REL, please refer to this paper.